This is not a book about the mafia and opera, but about a certain idea of Sicily that brings them together. The place that this idea holds in the popular imagination raises some crucial questions about Italian history and identity.
This little book makes a big narrative leap in time, media and imagination. Starting from an iconic film on the Italian-American mafia and its use of a classic Sicilian-Tuscan opera, it stages a fantasy of return to the school of poetry that flourished in medieval Sicily and marked the origins of Italian poetry. This is a story within a story. It blurs the line between the inside and the outside, undoes clichés with classics, reads poetry with popular culture. This is not a book about the mafia and opera as such, but about a certain idea of Sicily that brings them together. The place that this idea holds in the popular imagination raises some crucial questions about Italian history and identity. Across a thousand years of cultural and colonial inventions of Sicily, from its American fantasy to its Arab legacy, from cinema to sonnet, this book wants to reframe these questions for a concise and critical introduction to the Italian poetic origins.
Davide Messina is Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
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